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THE WORLD;Gunboat Diplomacy, '96 Model

ONLY hours after the orders went out from the White House last weekend, 81,000 tons of hardened gray steel began to shake to life in the Persian Gulf. The aircraft carrier Nimitz picked up speed, slicing through the briny waters of the gulf, its course set due east. President Clinton had ordered the Nimitz to join another carrier, the Independence, off Taiwan as a reminder to China that the United States intended to protect its Taiwanese friends.

In fighting for its slice of the Pentagon budget, the Navy could not have asked for better symbolism -- a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, that most powerful symbol of seaborne might, rushing to protect a threatened ally, projecting American military supremacy in a corner of the world central to the American economy.

For many in Asia outside of China, the reaction was gratitude -- and relief. The Taiwan Government said the American warships would be "helpful, stabilizing and, hopefully, also persuasive" in moderating Beijing's behavior in the runup to Taiwan's national elections next Saturday. Said a Southeast Asian diplomat: "We cannot antagonize the Chinese by saying it publicly, but everybody will be more comfortable with American ships in place."

A quarter century after the humiliations of the Vietnam War, the cries of "Yankee, Go Home" once heard across Asia have been largely replaced with equally anguished pleas of "Yankee, Stay Here."

In most of Asia, the American military long ago shed whatever image it had as the war machine of an ogreish superpower. Today, the image -- accurate or not -- is one of the honest broker that can help keep the peace, and as the only counterweight to China's growing military power.

The Navy was deploying off Taiwan "in a precautionary measure," said Vice Adm. Archie Ray Clemins, the commander of the United States Seventh Fleet, in a telephone interview from his command ship, the Blue Ridge, as it sailed from Indonesia to the South China Sea to keep watch on Chinese missile tests near Taiwan. "We do not want to see escalation," he said. "China has said that they are not going to attack Taiwan, and that's exactly what we want to see happen." The ships will be in place for the elections.

Across much of Asia, , the role of regional policeman falls largely to the United States Navy. Unlike the Army and the Air Force, which require land bases and airstrips, the Navy can establish a long-term presence without infringing on anyone's borders. It can be dispatched at a pace that allows diplomacy to cool a crisis even as the ships proceed; it can show resolve without risking what American generals have learned to dread: a land war in Asia.

The Navy has been patrolling Asian waters since the early part of the 19th century, and its sailors have been balancing diplomacy and warfare since the 1850's, when Commodore Matthew C. Perry used his big guns to force Japan to end 250 years of isolation.

Some Asian government officials accuse the American military of habitually overstating its role as an Asian peacekeeper. And the United States often seems under threat of overstaying its welcome. Having shut down its bases in the Philippines under nationalist pressure four years ago, it now finds that the recent rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by three American servicemen has galvanized opposition to American military bases in Okinawa and the rest of Japan.

But something has obviously gone right in Asia in the years since the Vietnam War, and the American military claims at least part of the credit.

After spending much of the previous 50 years at each others' throats, Asian nations -- with a few notable exceptions like North Korea, Cambodia and Vietnam -- have spent the last quarter-century making peace, and making money.

Without expensive armies to build and wars to fight, most Asian nations channeled their resources into building factories and creating jobs. As a result, the continent is home to the world's fastest-growing economies, with none growing faster than China's.

China's Private Feelings

Joseph S. Nye Jr., a former Assistant Secretary of Defense who is dean of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, said that even the Chinese privately concede that the American military presence has helped keep the peace by restraining the military ambitions of China's old foe, Japan.

"In public," he said, "the Chinese will say that no country should have the right to put its troops outside its own borders."

But behind closed doors, he said, the Chinese will "give you a lecture about the dangers of Japanese militarism" and then express their reluctant willingness to allow the American military to remain in Asia.

As a military threat, China is seen by its neighbors as more a problem for the future than the present. It has the world's largest military force, but its weaponry is mostly antiquated, its nearly 3 million troops mostly untrained in modern tactics.

The Pentagon has said that whatever its vast numerical advantage over its tiny island neighbor, China would have difficulty invading Taiwan because of its meager amphibious forces. By that logic, what was happening last week seemed an effort to do no more than right the balance of psychological power in the region, by sending a symbol of American might to parry the sense of vulnerability sowed by China's live-fire exercises off Taiwan.

But the balance of real power is shifting rapidly, and within several years, China may prove far more menacing as it tries to fulfill its aspirations as Asia's economic and military powerhouse. Its military budget has grown at a double-digit pace in recent years, with a new emphasis on advanced weapons.

The Chinese have also demonstrated a new willingness to flex their muscle. There was alarm throughout Southeast Asia last year when the Chinese Navy overran a group of tiny, potentially oil-rich atolls in the South China Sea and raised the Chinese flag. The atolls, part of a larger island chain known as the Spratlys, are hundreds of miles from the Chinese mainland.

And as China's military strength grows, a budget-conscious United States has cut back its military forces deployed in the Pacific, alarming those of China's neighbors who had come to depend on an American defensive shield. Since 1991, the Navy's Pacific Fleet has been cut from 250 ships to 195, the number of sailors and marines from 250,000 to 215,000. The Navy is fighting to avoid any more cuts. But in that battle, the Navy confronts American taxpayers, who in one opinion poll after another have expressed the view that the United States should no longer serve as the policeman of Asia -- or any other part of the world.

Navy admirals in the Pacific are now trained to recite the economic facts: The nations of Asia and the Pacific are responsible for more than one-third of all American trade, and Asian trade is directly linked to an estimated three million jobs in the United States. The loss of major Asian sealanes could stem the flow of foreign oil to American ports.

"Americans have to understand what Asia means to their paychecks, what it means to their jobs," said Stanley R. Arthur, a retired admiral who commanded the Seventh Fleet from 1990 to 1992. "They have to understand who America's economic partners are."